评审团奖金获奖者

I discovered eyeka(.asia) in 2009 while I was looking for an online competition. Since then, I have been regularly checking the competitions on eYeka. I usually started with a concept, then listing down the elements that I need or elements that I think might be a problem, and then I proceed to the production up to post-production. LastIy, I work alone on my creations.

I discovered eYeka 2 years ago through a video contest community site. I signed up and I’ve been receiving the emails ever since. Here’s our creative process that we’ve honed in the 4 years that my partners and I have been doing online video competitions:

We first decide which contests we would like to do. We pick by prize size and also if it has secondary prizes, execution difficulty, and fun factor. A commercial for an airline company is harder for a phone company, so a phone company gets our attention because it’s easier to execute a video for. As for fun factor, can we have fun with the idea? Can we make it humorous? If we can, then that contest takes precedent. We don’t like to make videos for stuffy, serious companies because those usually lead to boring videos.

After we decide which contests we’d like to do, we read the creative brief, and decide again if we really want to do the contest. If we say yes to the creative brief, then we take FIVE MINUTES and only five minutes to brainstorm ideas. We’ve discovered that if we take more than five minutes to find at least one good idea then we probably shouldn’t do the contest.

If we can’t think of a good idea in five minutes, then we put the contest in the back burner, and worry about it later. If we CAN think of a good or funny idea in five minutes, we will write them down. Then we start another round of five minutes and hone the idea. Finally, we write the script to fill in the details and prepare a day to shoot it.

I always work with my two partners Rocky Collins and Mario Reyes, and occasionally Gene Nagata. We’re all apart of Anchorbolt Studios, a small production company that we run. We shot it at an industrial loft and used an actress Rocky met recently, and Mario’s brother as the guy at the very end. For the “Blind Date” video, we engaged an actor that Mario knew.

We shot the whole video in 4 hours, starting at 8am and ending at 12pm on a Sunday. I was able to edit it in about 2 weeks and turn it in.

I found eYeka while I was looking for video contests on the Internet, and it was a great discovery. Ever since I found out about eYeka, I checked it out to find any interesting contests. The creation process was easy because everything was stated in the brief and in the premise “turn a situation to your advantage, with a real life swipe”.

I think about situations that I would want to change in my day-to-day life with a simple swipe on the screen of my mobile phone. I recorded the video images with my wife, Cristina, and then I added some effects and composed the music. It was incredible because when we were recording the dinner scene, some people in my town launched fireworks! I took this opportunity to incorporate the visuals to my video and voilà!